Women’s History Month: Casimir Pulaski

Sometimes, history gets thrown for a loop and in interesting ways.  Kazimierz Michał Władysław Wiktor Pułaski lived from 1745 to 1779, born in Warsaw, Poland, but killed in battle near Savannah, in the American rebel colony of Georgia.  Pulaski was killed while attempting to rally panicked French cavalry, shot down by grapeshot–an ugly way to go as grapeshot are the cannon-using equivalent of a shotgun’s pellets.  Pulaski died a hero (he also saved the rebel bacon two years prior helping Washington and his men from being surrounded at Brandywine).

Pulaski is known here in Illinois mostly for Pulaski Day, a holiday created by a politician (Democratic) to lock in the vote of ethnic Poles in Chicago and the surrounding towns (now suburbs).  It’s an official day off for most schools and state government offices.  I just missed it with writing this, actually.

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Here’s the catch.  Back in the 1990s, a skeleton was exhumed from its grave to determine if it really was Pulaski or if someone else was buried there instead.  The results weren’t conclusive.  The skeleton had a defect where Pulaski had had a tumor, the skull had a healed injury in the same place Pulaski suffered a battle wound.  The catch was–the skeleton wasn’t male.

Yup–the body there (since proved to be Pulaski) had female physical characteristics, meaning that Pulaski was—a woman?

That’s where we get to the issue of gender and what is/isn’t women’s history.  Pulaski was raised as a boy, educated the same, and by the time he was 20, was recognized as a battlefield commander.  No one questioned he was a man (if you see paintings, you’ll note he has a moustache).  Did he have female organs on the inside, male genitalia on the outside?  A situation like that would make him intersex.

Biology is complicated.  Genetically, you have men and women, sometimes with ‘defects’.  Which was Pulaski?  Now you have a different issue–the question of gender because gender is not the same as sex.  Gender is something you create for yourself, influenced by those around you.   That means Pulaski was genetically female, but with a male gender.

I note all this because it is women’s history month (no matter how much I hate segregated history types).  Life is complicated.  It’s likely Pulaski knew things weren’t quite ‘right’ in terms of society or his interests, but they didn’t understand things like sex/gender as we do now in the 21st century.  Move forward 300 more years and historians of that age will look back at today as barbarian science and thought as well.

So with Pulaski, let’s celebrate her for his actions–because that’s how we all wish to be remembered, not for a gender or label, but what we did, the mark we leave:

• Saved George Washington, enabled the Revolutionary Army to keep fighting in 1777

• The “Father of American Cavalry” (and its tactics)

• Renowned for defending liberty from oppression (both in Poland and North America)

• Spent his own money to outfit three troops of cavalry and a small regiment of infantry to fight for the Colonial cause of personal liberty and representative government